Costa Jill

My son Ray is my book finder. He has the most eclectic taste and is more widely read than anyone else I know. On my visit to see him and the family, one of the several books that make it into my suitcase is Writers Dreaming by Naomi Epel. While she was working as a literary escort and a dream facilitator she interviewed 26 writers on the importance of dreams in both their writing and their lives. As I pick up this slim ten-year-old volume I have no idea it will move me so profoundly.

Listed alphabetically, I start with Isabel Allende and am immediately hooked. I cut my teeth on The House of Spirits in my “magical realism” period. Right away she clarifies my nebulous views on dreams.

“It’s as if one has a storage room where you have information that you can’t reach when you’re awake…In that dreamy state, somehow you can reach in the darkness and find something like a treasure that is hidden in this storage room…a smell, color, sight, sound…from your awakened state…and it yours, a kind of collective memory.”

I’ve always had a vivid surreal dream life and I’ve written down the most significant, prophetic, weird ones – whatever word you want to use – because they begged to be remembered.

Then, several paragraphs later, in a few gorgeously succinct words, she clarifies my hazy concept of existence. “I think that we are all particles of some sort of universal spirit. If we can get over this idea of our little bodies, our little selfishness and greed, this idea that we are something individual, just forget about it and tune into the wonderful, peaceful idea that we are just part of something that is there and whole and is part of your grandson and part of the flowers and part of everything…that wholeness.”

Of course Allende, as a Latin American, was born to be magical, and I was born to be a scientific North American. I was taught to solve all problems using the scientific method. Ray tells me this same idea can be explained by the science of quantum physics and that makes me feel even better. I don’t have to believe in God, or anti-God. I believe in a Life Force, a spark of energy that begins somewhere and will continue on when my old dead bones or ashes return to the earth, air or water to help something else to grow in my place. Two “Aha” moments one after the other. Wow, am I enjoying this book!

My very pragmatic logical view of life, including the study and teaching of science has been made richer by an active and diverse dream life, but in the last few years those dreams have eluded me. Thinking that the age of short-term memory loss also includes losing that utterly important other reality – my dream life – I’ve just about given up hope of getting it back, even though my son has been telling me I could retrieve my lost dreams by concentrating on remembering them.

I don’t actually have any success until reading Writer’s Dreaming. Slowly, day by day, little bits of dreams snag in my memory upon awakening. I roll them around, savor their sweetness before arising – colors, feelings, sights, sounds. Lucidity returns. I can control some of them or at least recognize that they’re dreams if they become frightening. I return to writing the evocative ones down.

These writers are not only reconnecting me with my dreams, but providing me insight into the creative process. I’m breaking through my writer’s block. I pay closer attention to my favorites: Isabel Allende, Maya Angelou, Gloria Naylor, Stephen King, Maurice Sendak. But some of the most dog-eared pages come from those I haven’t read who are now on my list: Clive Barker, Leonard Michaels, Allan Gurganus.

Though ten years old, thank you Naomi Epel, for this gift of Writers Dreaming, Better late than never, and just in time to help me finish my own first book, Faultlines, a series of short stories about taking risks. According to Herman Melville, being a writer is akin to being a diver. There are dreadful risks when diving deep into the psyche, but if you don’t dive you discover nothing about yourself. May we dream on, read on and write on!

What made the recent Herald Tribune article about the Sarasota High class of 1970’s 40^th reunion newsworthy, was the fact that it was the first time in all those years that the rift of racial conflict between the black and white alumni was finally mended. The article calls it “a benchmark of social progress,” and continues, “The reunions have been mostly segregated for the last four decades.”

This statement shocked me into a tumble of mixed emotions and old memories. The first was shame. Forty years this segregation has continued, though the schools were integrated in 1967? I graduated in 1961 from Venice High and lived without any real consciousness that my contemporary black students from Venice were bused to Booker High in Sarasota. As I look back at the conservative 50’s, I think of myself as one of the naive sheep following the herd over the cliff. It wasn’t the Age of Aquarius yet, but ‘times they were a changin’. Why has it taken so long?

The second was pride. In the 80’s, black students were still being bused out of their home districts. My deaf son was attending the re-opened magnet school – Booker High, which he loved. His junior year he chose to attend Riverview for two reasons: one, it had the only resource teacher for the deaf, and two, he wanted to experience a larger school population and choice of subjects, to see if he could compete with his hearing peers. He could and did, but not before going through reverse discrimination. He was the only white kid on the bus and deaf to boot. He fought back, on his own, on all fronts and stuck with it until, by the end of the school year, the riders respected each other’s challenges and became good friends.

Now in my 60’s, I’ve had the opportunity to travel, teach and volunteer in both the United States and around the world and I still see the horrible inequities of life surrounding us. I was lucky to have grown up in the United States and, being an eternal optimist, I still have hope for freedom and peace worldwide. But, baby, we’ve got a long way to go.